On world historians in the sixteenth century

Representations

Volumn 91, Issue , 2005, Pages 26-57

  Subrahmanyam, Sanjay ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35448968764     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2005.91.1.26     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Sir Edward Sherburne, The Tragedies of L. Annaeus Seneca, the Philosopher (London, 1702), 43-44. For a modern prose translation, see Samuel Lieberman, ed., Roman Drama (New York, 1964), 360
2. Work of scholars in postcolonial studies was thus anticipated in many respects by Shelly Errington, "Some Comments on Style in the Meanings of the Past," Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (1979): 231-44, who asserted that "history" as a category was inappropriate a priori for a study of sixteenth-century Malay texts, since it was a "genre" that developed uniquely in "the Italian city-states of the Renaissance." This view in turn derived from her reading of Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970)
3. Ashis Nandy "History's Forgotten Doubles," History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995): 45-47
4. Dipesh Chakrabarty "Globalization, Democratization, and the Evacuation of History?" in Jackie Assayag and Véronique Bénéï, eds., At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West (New Delhi, 2003), 129
5. For example, Grant Hardy, "Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to Modern Western Theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-ma Chi'en," History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994): 20-38. Note that Hardy uses the term "historian" to describe Sima Qian (145 BCE-86 BCE?)
6. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (New Delhi, 2001). Also see François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003)
7. For a fascinating example of such competing views of the past, see Mercedes García-Arenal, "El entorno de los plomos: Historiografia y linaje," Al-Oantara 24, no. 2 (2003): 295-325
8. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735-62
9. also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750," Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75-104
10. Cited in Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chicago, 1995), xvi
11. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II(New Haven, 1998), 4-5
12. Jahangir is also well known for having commissioned several portrayals of himself involving a globe, notably one in which he dreams of embracing the ruler of Iran, Shah 'Abbas. See, for instance, Stuart Gary Welch, Imperial Mughal Painting (New York, 1978)
13. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, Colo., 1993)
14. R. Woolf, ed., A Global Encyclopaedia of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (New York, 1998)
15. Certainly this seems to be the suggestion in John E. Wills Jr., 1688: A Global History (New York, 2001)
16. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York, 2003). A synopsis of the chief arguments in the text that may be found on the website http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/1.1/manning. html
17. Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat, and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Āli (1541-1600) (Princeton, 1986), 7
18. Andreas Tietze, ed. and trans., Mustafā 'Āli's Counsel for Sultans of 1581, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1978-83)
19. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 241. Also see Jan Schmidt, Mustafā '̄Alī's Künhü'l Ahbār and Its Preface According to the Leiden Manuscript (Istanbul, 1987)
20. See, for example, Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1994)
21. also Chase Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, 2002)
22. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 295. 'Ali's work was incidentally criticized by some near-contemporaries such as Katib Çelebi (1609-57), who argued that "it contained a mass of things both important and unimportant," in the words of Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge, 1999), 153
23. Domingo Chimalpáhin, Las ocho relaciones y el memorial de Colhuacan, ed. and trans. Rafael Tena (Mexico City, 1998), 64-70
24. Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d'une mondialisation (Paris, 2004)
25. Henrico Martinez, Repertoria de los tiempos y historia natural de Nueva España, (reprint; Mexico City, 1981), Treatise 5, chap. 7, 215
26. Richard L. Kagan, "Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain," in Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, 1995), 85
27. For a discusssion of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesilla's work, see Richard L. Kagan, "Felipe II: El hombre y la imagen," in Felipe II y el arte de su tiempo (Madrid, 1998), 457-73
28. for the text, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar océano, o, "Décadas," ed. Mariano Cuesta Domingo, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1991)
29. David Morgan, "Persian Perceptions of Mongols and Europeans" in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1994), 201-17
30. Vladimir Minorsky, ed., Hudūd al-'ālam, the Regions of the World: A Persian Geography, 327 A.H.-982 A.D. (Karachi, 1980)
31. Amin Ahmad Razi, Haft iqlīm, or, The Geographical and Biographical Encyclopaedia of Amīn Ahmad Rāzī, ed. E. Denison Ross and Khan Sahib Maulavi 'Abdul Muqtadir, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1918-1939)
32. also Haft iqlīm (The Seven Climes), ed. Javad Fazil, 3 vols. (Tehran, 1960)
33. Georg Schurhammer, "Una ipotesi sulla fine di Antonio Pigafetta," in Schurhammer, Gesammelte Studien: Orientalia, ed. por László Szilas (Rome, 1963), 455-61
34. João de Barros, Da Ásia, Década Primeira, parte segunda, Livro (reprint; Lisbon, 1973), 223-35
35. "Como a Cidade Quiloa se fundou, e os Reys que teve té ser tornada per nós: e como D. Francisco de Almeida novamente fez Rey della a Mahamed Anconij"; and for a discussion, Gabriel Ferrand, "Les Sultans de Kilwa," in Mémorial Henri Basset: Nouvelles études nord-africaines et orientales (Paris, 1928), 239-60
36. For a brief discussion of this text, see Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West During the Eighteenth Century (Karachi, 1998), 39-40
37. Rauzat ut-Tāhirīn, esp. book 5, chap. 5, fols. 621a-26, Ms. Elliot 314 (Sachau-Ethé No. 100), Bodleian Library Oxford; also see British Library; London, Ms. Oriental 168, fls. 698a-700. Work on this section was done jointly with Muzaffar Alam, with whom I will be publishing a more extensive discussion of the text. Manuscripts of this very widely read text exist in the National Library (Kolkata), Buhar Collection; the Asiatic Society of Bengal; the Khuda Bakhsh Library (Patna); the British Library (six manuscripts); in the Majlis Library, Teheran; the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin; and in St. Petersburg. For a brief account of this text, see H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, 12 vols. (London, 1867-77), 6:195-201. For an eighteenth-century discussion of this text, see Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, trans. Kaiser Haq (Leeds, 2001), 39-40
38. The reference here seems to be to the transition between Sultan 'Alauddin Mansur Syah (r. 1579-1586) and the "usurper" Sultan 'Alauddin Ri'ayat Syah al-Mukammil (the latter being the grandfather of the celebrated Sultan Iskandar Muda, r. 1607-36). Al-Mukammil is reputed to have killed Mansur Syah, and then ruled as regent for a time over the "boy-king" Sultan Buyung, before eventually seizing direct power in c. 1589. It would be useful to compare Tahir's materials with those in Jorge M. dos Santos Alves and Pierre-Yves Manguin, O "Roteiro das Cousas do Achem" de D. João Ribeiro Gaio: Um olhar português sobre o Norte de Samatra em finais do século XVI (Lisbon, 1997)
39. For a broader discussion of this passage and related questions, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Europeans and Europe, 1500-1800," The Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 1 (2005): 69-100
40. This text, incidentally, is not noticed in a rather hasty dismissal of Mughal xenology by Simon Digby "Beyond the Ocean: Perceptions of Overseas in Indo-Persian Sources of the Mughal Period," Studies in History, n. s., 14, no. 2 (1999): 247-59
41. António Galvão, Tratado dos Descobrimentos, ed. Visconde de Lagoa and Elaine Sanceau, 4th ed. (Oporto,1987)
42. Hubert Jacobs, ed., A Treatise on the Moluccas (c. 1544), Probably the Preliminary Version of António Galvão's Lost "História das Molucas" (Rome, 1971)
43. See Jean Aubin, "Les frustrations de Duarte Pacheco Pereira," in Le Latin et l'Astrolabe, vol. 1, Recherches sur le Portugal, de la Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations internationales (Paris, 1996), 111-32
44. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, ed. Damião Peres (Lisbon, 1988)
45. A. G. Hopkins, "Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History" Past and Present l64 (1999): 198-243
46. Galvão, Tratado dos Descobrimentos, 299
47. On Richard Hakluyt, see for example Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992)
48. The first French version from 1581 is Histoire de Portugal contenant les entreprises, navigations et gestes mémorables des Portugallois ... depuis l'an 1496 jusques à l'an 1578 ... comprinse en vingt livres, dont les douze premiers sont traduits du latin de Jérosme Osorius ...., nouvellement mise en français par S. G. S., followed by a number of other editions from Geneva. The first English translation dates from far later, for which see The History of the Portuguese during the reign of Emmanuel, containing all their discoveries from the coast of Africk to the farthest parts of China ..., including also their discovery of Brazil and their wars with the Moors, written originally in Latin by Jerome Osorio, trans. James Gibbs, 2 vols. (London, 1742)
49. Richard Hakluyt, "The Epistle Dedicatorie," in Antonio Galvão, The discoveries of the world, from their first original unto the year of Our Lord 1555, by Antonio Galvano, governor of Ternate. Corrected, quoted, and published in England, by Richard Hakluyt (1601), reprinted with the original Portuguese text and ed. Vice-Admiral C. B. Bethune (London, 1862), iii-vi
50. Henri Bernard-Maitre, "L'orientaliste Guillaume Postel et la découverte spirituelle du Japon en 1552," Monumenta Nipponica 9, no. 1-2 (1953): 83-108; also see the more recent discussion in Jurgis S. Elisonas, "An Itinerary to the Terrestrial Paradise: Early European Reports on Japan and a Contemporary Exegesis," Itinerario 20, no. 4 (1996): 25-68
51. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 vols. (Turin, 1978-88)
52. Marcin Bielski, Kronika: tho iesth, Historya swiátá (Warsaw, 1976)
53. Jan Kieniewicz, "Nouvelles et merchandises: La perspective polonaise des découvertes portugaises au XVIe siècle," in Jean Aubin, ed., La Découverte, le Portugal, et l'Europe (Paris, 1990), 331-45
54. For a somewhat larger perspective on these questions, see E. Iglói, "Die ersten polnischen, ungarischen und russischen Berichte über die Entdeckung Amerikas," Slavica: Annales Instituti Philologiae Slavicae Universitatis Debreciniensis 4 (1964): 121-30
55. Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of "Tarih-i Hind-i Carbi" and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990)
56. Joseph Matuz, ed. and trans., L'ouvrage de Seyfī Çelebī, historien ottoman du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1968)
57. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, trans., La première histoire de France en turc ottoman: Chroniques despadichahs de France, 1572 (Paris, 1997)
58. See Gottfried Hagen, "Überzeitlichkeit und Geschichte in Katib Celebis Gihannüma," Archivum Ottomanicum 14(1995-96): 133-59
59. Sholeh A. Quinn, Historical Writing During the Reign of Shah 'Abbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City, 2000). A broadly similar position is expressed in Rudi Matthee, "Between Aloofness and Fascination: Safavid Views of the West," Iranian Studies 31, no. 2 (1998): 219-46
60. For a development of this idea, see Denys Lombard, "Les Luisades comparées à deux autres 'visions' de la fin du XVIe siècle: Le Xi Yang Ji et le roman malais d'Alexandre," in Artur Teodoro de Matos and Luís Filipe F. Reis Thomaz, eds., As Relações entre a Índia Portuguesa, a Ásia do Sueste e o Extreme Oriente: Actos do VI Seminário Internacional de História Indo-Portuguesa (Macau-Lisbon, 1993), 173-85
61. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, 1998), 170-71
62. W. B. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank, eds., Historians of China and Japan (London, 1961)
63. On these tongshi, see Rafe De Crespigny, "Universal Histories," in Donald Leslie, Colin Mackerras, and Wang Gungwu, eds., Essays on the Sources for Chinese History (Canberra, 1973), 64-70
64. Shintaro Ayusawa, "Geography and Japanese Knowledge of World Geography," Monumenta Nipponica 19, no. 3-4(1964): 275-94. For a more general discussion, see Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603-1868 (Berkeley 2003)
65. For a translation of this text, see George Elison [Jurgis Elisonas], Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 319-47
66. Bernard Hung-kay Luk, "A Study of Giulio Aleni's Chih-fang wai chi," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 40, no. 1 (1977): 58-84
67. See Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch'a Sheng-Lan [Xingcha shenglan]: The Overall Survey of the Star Raft, trans. J V G. Mills, ed. Roderick Ptak (Wiesbaden, 1996), 9-11
68. For this text, see for instance Victor Lieberman, "How Reliable is U Kala's Burmese Chronicle? Some New Comparisons," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17, no. 2 (1986): 236-55
69. This would appear to be the direction of analysis espoused in Jacques Gernet, L'intelligence de la Chine: Le social et le mental (Paris, 1994), 313-45
70. Jakov S. Luria, "Fifteenth-Century Chronicles as a Source for the History of the Formation of the Muscovite State," in Medieval Russian Culture, vol. 2, ed. Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (Berkeley 1994), 47-56
71. Daniel B. Rowland, "Moscow: The Third Rome or the New Israel," The Russian Review 55 (1996): 591-614
72. Prince André Kourbski, Histoire du règne de Jean IV (Ivan le Terrible), trans. M. Forstetter, introduction by Alexandre V Soloviev (Geneva, 1965)
73. George Vernadsky et al., A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1972), 1:131-52, citation on 150. Also see Basil Dmytryshyn, Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850-1700, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, 1991), 294-305
74. For a general reflection, see Edward L. Keenan, "The Trouble with Muscovy: Some Observations upon Problems of the Comparative Study of Form and Genre in Historical Writing," Medieval Historiography, ed. Paul Maurice Clogan (Denton, Tex., 1974), 103-26
75. Private communication from Valerie Kivelson, University of Michigan. This would presumably call into question the presuppositions in certain earlier studies such as Mark Bassin, "Russia Between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space," Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 1-17
76. Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World in Five Books, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1820), 1 :i. Also see John Racin, Sir Walter Ralegh as Historian: An Analysis of "The History of the World" (Salzburg, 1974)
77. Ralegh, The History of the World, 6:368-69
78. For a sense of the matrix of possibilities, also see the work of Ralegh's exact contemporary Sir Anthony Sherley, in Le "Peso politico de todo el mundo" d'Anthony Sherley: ou, un aventurier anglais ou service de l'Espagne, ed. Xavier-A. Flores (Paris, 1963)
79. Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire: Texte intégral (Paris, 1996)
80. Such a move gains support today ironically enough, from "subalternist" historians, anxious to claim that only Europeans possessed a historical sensibility until the nine-teenth century. See, for example, Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York, 2002), whose ostensibly anti-Hegelian agenda contrasts sharply with the actual complicity of the text with many aspects of Hegel's own conception
81. This tradition derives in some measure from such writings as Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), but also see such works as T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton, 1995)
82. and Mark Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian's Craft (Toronto, 1977). Also see the earlier work by George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana, 1970), which also sees this sixteenth-century problem as a purely European (indeed Western European) one. For a recent variation, still within an "internalist" European mode, see Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004), focusing on the seventeenth-century figure of Hermann Conring
83. Ironically Joseph Scaliger, one of the exemplars of such historiography, was wrestling in the later years of his life with problems posed by Chinese and Mexican historical traditions. Cf. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993), 394-459